Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 2066 - 2090 of 2213
WASHINGTON (JTA)—When it comes to foreign assistance, American law couldn’t be clearer: A coup d’etat suspends funding, period. But the directive, which has persisted for years in federal appropriations bills, is clashing with another congressional priority: the apparent desire to foster an alternative to Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s democratically elected Islamist president who was removed from power this week by the Egyptian military. In recent months, Congress has intimated that it would be happier if Morsi’s secular foes in the military...
ISTANBUL—The decadeslong conflict between the Turkish government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is closer to an end than it ever has been before thanks to the ongoing peace negotiations, despite setbacks on both sides. The Kurds have been demanding separation from Turkey to create an independent Kurdistan, or, at a minimum, more political and cultural rights for Kurds within Turkey. The strife has continued for more than 30 years and left some 40,000 dead on both sides. The Gezi Park protests in Istanbul (which spread acr...
Israel should do all it can to help the new secular government in Egypt beat the Muslim Brotherhood, even if that means amending the Military Annex of the Camp David peace accords to allow more Egyptian military assets into the Sinai Peninsula, the former director of Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau in the Prime Minister’s Office Brig. Gen. (Res.) Nitzan Nuriel said Sunday. Speaking to Army Radio, Nuriel said a defeat for the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters in the Sinai would reverberate across the Middle East, and would be of huge str...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—It’s almost boilerplate: The American Jewish community asks a foreign leader with whom it has cultivated a close relationship to kindly tell firebrands in the leader’s government to pipe down and fall in with an established policy that happens to be embraced by the U.S. government. Greece? Romania? Hungary? Russia? Try Israel. In a rare rebuke of a sitting Israeli minister, three major centrist Jewish groups in recent weeks have criticized Naftali Bennett, the economics chief...
Far from Kotel, Women of the Wall pray with police protection JERUSALEM (JTA)—Women of the Wall conducted its monthly prayer service at the Western Wall plaza with an occasional disturbance from protesters, but the worshipers were kept far from the wall itself. The women, who came to the holy site Monday morning to mark the beginning of the Hebrew month of Av, were blocked with barricades in the southern part of the plaza. The Western Wall was not in sight, blocked by the Mughrabi Bridge to t...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—The large white poster is topped by a screaming headline written in large black letters: “Hell.” Posted on a wall in Jerusalem’s haredi Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, the sign describes a development that threatens the community with “extinction” and “makes all living hearts tremble.” Known as a pashkvil in Yiddish, the signs are common in Mea Shearim, most of them announcing upcoming funerals or opportunities for Torah study. But several now predict impending doom...
It’s the first day of school for Chani Dickman, an ultra-Orthodox woman in her 40s. She is one of 20 ultra-Orthodox women participating in a training course for medical coding—reading patients charts and diagnoses and assigning the proper codes that are used for insurance reimbursement. If she passes her exams, she is guaranteed a full-time job with HRS, a Baltimore-based company that does medical coding. She’ll start out above minimum wage and her compensation will increase every year. Dickman will be coming to the Jerusalem Techn...
Tal Shavit, 26, is studying political science at Hebrew University and was looking for a job in Jerusalem for after graduation. She hooked up with New Spirit, a nonprofit trying to encourage students to stay in the holy city after they graduate and they arranged an internship with Policy, a large lobbying organization. Even before her four-month internship ended, Policy offered her a job, and Shavit now plans to stay in Jerusalem. “I wanted to find a way to stay in Jerusalem because I don’t really feel at home anywhere else,” Shavit told The M...
In critical condition with severe shrapnel injuries to their torso and limbs, bullet wounds from head to toe and open fractures—this is how Syrian patients arrive at Israeli hospitals in the north of the country. And they are all treated like any other patient. “It’s our duty as a regional hospital, where we are located along the Lebanese border on one side and the Syrian border on the other side,” Dr. Amram Hadary, director of the trauma unit at Ziv Medical Center in Safed, tells ISRAEL2...
Google’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Waze, the Israeli-developed traffic crowdsourcing app that has won the hearts of 50 million users in 193 countries, is perhaps now recognized more for keeping the company in its Tel Aviv headquarters than for its nine zeroes, and is being touted as a national victory for Israel. Yet, the pride that flowed from the agreement to keep Waze’s talent put (Netanyahu himself called company heads to say “You’ve reach your destination!”) indicates an underlyin...
As technology grows by leaps and bounds, leading thinkers gathered last week at the 2013 Israeli Presidential Conference to discuss the future of warfare. Israel’s cyber weapons will eventually replace the pre-emptive strike role the Israel Air Force famously played in the 1967 Six Day War, according to Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (res.) Yair Cohen, former commander of Israel’s much-vaunted signal intelligence corps Unit 8200. Cohen predicted that in the future, Israel would be able to neutralize enemy weapons systems and units with “a...
When it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, everything, even a hamburger, is political. Israelis who live in areas that Israel acquired in 1967 are up in arms over McDonald’s decision not to open a branch in the mall that will be built in Ariel over the next year. In Israel, the McDonald’s franchise is private and is owned by Omri Padan, one of the founders of the dovish group Peace Now, which opposes Israeli building in post-1967 areas. There are 170 McDonald’s restaurants in Israel, about 40 of which are kosher. The company’s website...
Kerry leaves Israel without deal for peace talks, sees progress JERUSALEM (JTA)—U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry left Israel without bringing Israeli and Palestinian officials back to the peace negotiating table. Kerry said, however, that “real progress” had been made during his whirlwind trip and he would return to the region. He left Israel for Asia on Sunday afternoon following three meetings each with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmo...
JERUSALEM—Within the past year, three student-run legislative bodies at University of California (UC) state schools—UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UC San Diego—passed resolutions urging divestment from Israel. These votes occurred amid allegations of the harassment of pro-Israel students on UC campuses. Yet at the same time, such resolutions were defeated at UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Santa Barbara, as well as outside the UC system at Stanford University. Who has the upper hand in the o...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last Sunday that former Bank of Israel Governor Prof. Jacob Frenkel, who headed the central bank between 1991 and 2000, will replace outgoing Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, whose term ended this week. The new governor’s nomination is pending the approval of the Public Service Nominations Committee, headed by Judge (ret.) Jacob Turkel, as well as a cabinet vote. The nomination faces a legislative hurdle, as the Bank of Israel Law of 1...
PARIS (JTA)—With scooter helmets in hand, a man called Yohan and six buddies stroll around Paris’ 20th arrondissement. The seven look much like a typical group of French students—until they locate a group of Arab men they suspect of perpetrating an anti-Semitic attack the previous day. Using their helmets as bludgeons, members of France’s Jewish Defense League, or LDJ, set upon the Arabs and beat them. Several of the Arabs attempt to escape in a blue sedan, but the LDJ members pursue the veh...
By Ben Sales SDEROT, Israel (JTA)—A thick concrete bomb shelter sits by the side of a central street in this embattled southern Israeli town, but Naomi Moravia can’t get inside. Shelters like this one are crucial in Sderot, which is about a mile from the Gaza Strip and is the frequent target of cross-border missile attacks that send residents running for cover. But Moravia can’t run. She can’t even get up on the sidewalk. Pushing a lever on her wheelchair, she rolls down the street looking...
David Baker doesn’t exactly agree that he has the toughest job in Israel, but he doesn’t deny it either. As the media front man for the Prime Minister’s Office, that kind of ducking and weaving comes with the territory, but Baker—a New Yorker by birth and rearing—can take it. “I’m from the boroughs—I’m a cool New Yorker,” he said, half-kidding, on a recent phone interview from Jerusalem, a few days before heading to the United States for one of his frequent visits. Baker, the senior foreign...
Some agunot, observant Jewish women trapped in unwanted marriages, wait many years for a Jewish divorce. Meanwhile, a number of activists after having devoted decades to the cause, have begun to wonder whether a solution to the agunah crisis is possible. Rivka Haut, for one, who 30 years ago helped found Agunah Inc., admitted that when Blu Greenberg—a magical name in Orthodox feminism since the 1960s—telephoned recently, suggesting an international agunah summit, “I was not so eager to come… Blu knows that. I said to her, ‘Why? We’ve had...
JERUSALEM—Israeli President Shimon Peres confessed to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that during Peres’ first visit to the Windy City, he felt profound jealousy when he saw the outstanding beauty and size of Lake Michigan and Chicago’s abundant water resources. Which is one of the reasons why the Land of Milk and Honey and the City by the Lake have joined forces to work to make fresh drinking water more plentiful and less expensive by the year 2020. In a ceremony at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Israeli...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—As the budding protest movement in Turkey against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan struggles to gain a foothold, Israel is watching the developments with some measure of ambivalence. On the one hand, Erdogan has led Turkey away from a close alliance with Israel, using his perch to castigate Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and curtailing once-cozy military ties with the Israel Defense Forces. A popular uprising that leaves Erdogan politically wounded could be w...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim of the haredi Orthodox organization Eda Haharedit shares little common ground with Reform Rabbi Uri Regev, a religious pluralism activist. But when news broke last week that Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, was arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering, Pappenheim and Regev had the same reaction: Who cares? For Pappenheim, the chief rabbi is a political figure who has scant influence as a religious leader. And to Regev, he rep...
BRUSSELS (JTA)—Bulgaria claims it has previously undisclosed evidence that further implicates Hezbollah in a deadly terrorist attack last year on Bulgarian soil, JTA has learned. A Bulgarian representative to the European Union said Wednesday that investigators have discovered that a Hezbollah operative was the owner of a printer used to produce fake documents that facilitated the July 19 bombing of a bus filled with Israeli tourists in Burgas. Five Israelis and their Bulgarian driver were killed in the attack. The disclosure was made at a m...
A new law being proposed by an Israeli parliamentarian would give preferential treatment in housing, employment and higher education to anyone who served in the army or did alternative national civilian service. The bill, which has been approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, has sparked controversy over whether it discriminates against groups such as Arab citizens of Israel and ultra-Orthodox Jews, neither of whom do military service. “This important bill gives those who serve the appreciation they deserve,” coalition cha...
BRUSSELS (JTA)—When guards dragged Shin Dong-hyuk from his North Korean cell in 1995, he was pretty sure the end was near. Dong-hyuk, then just 13, was born in the prison known as Camp 14, not far from Pyongyang. Camp 14 is part of a network of political prisons believed to be the largest in the world, where an estimated 150,000 dissidents and their families live in conditions reminiscent of Holocaust-era concentration camps. As he was brought to the camp’s execution field, Dong-hyuk rea...
